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A
Paler Shade of Black
By
Linda Beckerman, Ph. D.
The
jig is up. Thanks to the genetics revolution we now know that
there is no such thing as race. The Human Genome Project (HGP)
has determined unequivocally that there is the same amount of
genetic variation among individuals within a so called racial
group as there is between individuals in different racial
groups. What that means is that there is no real genetic
difference between blacks and whites or between whites and
Asians or between any of the so called races.
Wonder why it's been so hush-hush? I mean, you would think this
would be big news. Certainly on the order of Galileo stating
that the Earth goes around the Sun and not vice versa. But you
haven't heard it on NBC or read it in your local newspaper.
It's more or less kept within the high brow community as if the
common every day man in the street just couldn't take it. So you
can read about it in the Atlantic Monthly or New York
Times, but
not your home town newspaper. And some professors on ivory tower
college campuses are scrambling to prove it isn't so, just like
there some who argue that Darwin was a fruitcake and evolution a
stunt he pulled to grab the limelight.
But if we are all one race, which race are we? One answer is the
cute one that we are the "human race". But buckle your
seat belts folks, because the genetic answer is that we are all
really black. And white people are pale adaptations of black
people that evolved during the past 140,000 years.
From whence does this white skin come? Weren't we all taught
that it was the black people who evolved black skin and it
happened so they would be protected from getting skin cancer?
Forget it. Scientists have thrown the whole notion out. Here's
how evolution works. If you don't live long enough to reproduce,
your genes are lost to the gene pool forever. There being no
high school back when Humans came into being, females started
reproducing around the age of 13. Skin cancer develops later in
life when the female has already reproduced and her genes have
entered the world gene pool. Bye, bye skin cancer theory.
What scientists now believe is that everyone started out with
dark skin in the first place because it is protective against
absorbing too much Vitamin D, which is toxic. Too much vitamin D
causes calcium to be pulled from the intestines and bones and
deposited in soft tissues all over the body, damaging the
kidneys, heart and blood vessels. Dark skin screens out UV
radiation and your body, which uses UV to produce Vitamin D,
produces less of it - a real evolutionary advantage at the lower
latitudes where we began.
So where did the 10,000+ shades of paler brown, beige, pink,
white and what Crayola crayons used to call "flesh"
come from? Archaeological data places the origin of genetically
modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa approximately 140,000 years
ago. Humans then began migrating out of Africa in successive
waves, starting approximately 100,000 years or 5000 generations
ago. Now that scientists have mapped the human genome, they are
homing in on when each wave began their outward bound journey
and where they migrated to. So far they have confirmed that
everyone on the entire planet, even the 1.3 billion Chinese,
have a common ancestor back in Africa.
For example, the first wave appears to have been a migration to
the Middle East and then eastward and northward from there. Some
geneticists studying the human genome map believe that in a
later north moving wave, which occurred about 60,000 years ago,
a mere 50 people inbred together across successive generations
to create all the people who now occupy Europe (excluding recent
immigrants, of course).
But wait a minute, I have blond hair, blue eyes and my hair
isn't nappy and I don't have thick lips. So how can my great,
great, etc. grandfather be a black African? It's all from lines
of genetic inheritance splitting apart and then coming together
again.
Lines of genetic inheritance, or lineages, split apart when
there is a mutation that is evolutionarily advantageous, meaning
the mutation makes it more likely for someone to reproduce
greater numbers of offspring that survive. Someone with a
non-advantageous mutation has offspring that are less likely to
survive.
So as humans migrated out of Africa, why did dark-skinned people
start losing the genetics Powerball Lottery to their paler kin?
Lower UV levels in the sunlight of the more northern latitudes
meant a dark-skinned individual's body could not produce enough
Vitamin D. Insufficient Vitamin D would then result in a child
developing rickets. A child with rickets would not likely
reproduce either because it would die before it could or because
its pelvis would be so deformed it could not pass a child
through the birth canal. Its genes would be lost forever. So
lighter skin, and more absorption of Vitamin D at higher
latitudes would be an adaptive genetic advantage.
Interestingly, in high latitudes where some people still retain
dark skin, such as with the Inuit in the Arctic, the people
obtain significant amounts of Vitamin D from eating fish and sea
mammal blubber.
Seal blubber aside, what about all the other features that make
us look so different? Mutations that endure are often
advantageous to specific climates. For example, the tall thin
body of the Masai warrior dissipates heat while the short squat
body of the Inuit retains it. Long northern European noses
moisten and warm the air before it reaches lungs, while in
Africa short noses remain because the air is already moist and
warm. The Asian's eyelid folds protect their eyes against dry
sandy desert winds and wind driven snow. In the far north, light
sensitive blue eyes allow people to see better when it is dark
much of the year. The tightly coiled hair of the African keeps
the hair off his neck so he remains cooler. All these diverse
physical features promote the promulgation of different lines of
inheritance, or ethnic lineages.
Countering this splitting apart of ethnic lineages is the
melding through interbreeding between different ethnic lineages.
If you walk the Silk Road from Persia to China, across the
southern flank of Asia, you will see a continuum of physical
feature change. You will not be able to tell where the European
look ends and the Asian begins. Remember all those shots during
our assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan and the TV scans of
Afghani children? How many looked European and how many looked
Asian?
Many mechanisms for melding ethnic lineages have been at play.
The rape part of the plunder and pillage drill by invaders,
traders passing through with silver to buy bedtime favors,
marriages for political convenience to form alliances between
not so friendly tribes, and the boy and girl from neighboring
tribes sneaking out for a little tryst under the stars, have all
contributed to the recombining of diverse ethnic lineages.
So what we have instead of the meaningless terms Caucasian,
Negro, Asian, etc., is a large multiplicity of ethnic lineages,
all of whom descended from only a single black race. So don't
forget, next time you fill in the U.S. Census you should write
in the word Black next to the question about your race,
regardless of your shade of pale.
Copyright
by Linda Beckerman, Ph.D. November 2002
beckerman@cfl.rr.com
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A
recent escapee from Corporate America, Dr. Linda P. Beckerman
spent over 20 years as a Program Manager for the USAF and
several U.S. Defense Contractors. She quickly gained a
reputation for her ability to take an immature technology out of
the research lab and successfully transition it to engineering
and production. Her reward for this talent was to be handed
multi-million dollar programs in dire trouble to salvage and
restore to successful track. As she salvaged each program, she
was handed yet another, since the defense industry has no
shortage of badly managed programs.
During
this time, she became a student of the late Col. John Boyd (USAF,
Ret'd), who is considered by many to be the greatest military
strategist the United States military ever produced. From
him she learned "not to let the system own" her and that what
really matters is to "survive on your own terms." |
As a result, she quit being a salaried employee and became an
independent consultant. She refused jobs from customers who
merely wanted advice and only accepted those where she had an
active role in straightening out the customers' problems. Her
customers included a U.S. Defense Department Joint Program
Office and U.S. and International corporations. While a
consultant, she also held regular staff positions on several
company organization charts.
As a
female in mostly male-dominated engineering fields, the role of
independent consultant was a huge success since her earnings
doubled while working only half the amount of time previously
spent while salaried. She also had a lot of fun. The bad news
was many stretches of time living in hotels away from home.
In a
moment of sheer insanity Dr. Beckerman agreed to teach a
graduate level systems engineering course at the University of
Central Florida, an experience she did not repeat.
As a
typical corporate clone, Dr. Beckerman published a lot of
papers. These span a large variety of scientific and technical
subjects. As an independent consultant she published four more
papers, all related to the application of complexity science.
Dr.
Beckerman has now achieved full financial independence. While
she is not independently wealthy, being independently lower
class isn't bad either. She gets to wear her pajamas and
slippers all day if she wishes. She lives on 5.67 acres in the
rural southern countryside where she has four hens and a
rooster. They are healthy and run around in the green grass and
sunshine and the hens lay eggs that taste the way they are
supposed to and aren't filled with hormones and antibiotics. She
also has a large flower garden, a small vegetable garden, and
many fruit trees and berry bushes.
Her
dream for now and the future is to be a radical political
journalist. She wants to wake everybody up because this is
the only planet we have and we are all on it together.
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The Price of Civilization
Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
By
Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a book
that is essential reading for every
American. In a forceful, impassioned, and
personal voice, he offers not only a searing
and incisive diagnosis of our country’s
economic ills but also an urgent call for
Americans to restore the virtues of
fairness, honesty, and foresight as the
foundations of national prosperity. Sachs
finds that both political parties—and many
leading economists—have missed the big
picture, offering shortsighted solutions
such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to
address complex economic problems that
require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that
we have profoundly underestimated
globalization’s long-term effects on our
country, which create deep and largely unmet
challenges with regard to jobs, incomes,
poverty, and the environment. America’s
single biggest economic failure, Sachs
argues, is its inability to come to grips
with the new global economic realities.
Sachs describes a political system that has
lost its ethical moorings, in which
ever-rising campaign contributions and
lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the
citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to turn
the crisis around. He argues persuasively
that the problem is not America’s abiding
values, which remain generous and pragmatic,
but the ease with which political spin and
consumerism run circles around those values.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 26 February 2011
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